Originally published: May 8, 2013

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A casual perusal of the news might give one the impression that the automobile industry’s much-anticipated electric revolution has finally arrived. Indeed, a quick Google immediately trumpets headlines like “Hybrid, Electric Car Sales Projection May Be Too Conservative,” “Electric Car and Hybrid Car Sales Will Triple In The Next Six Years,” and “Annual U.S. Hybrid Sales Beyond 1 Million By 2015.” Legitimizing that optimism is the news that American electric drive vehicle sales were up 73%for a total 440,000 units in 2012. Such heady news would seem to imply that some sort of tipping point has finally been reached.

That is until you look closer at the numbers and find that most of the analysts being quoted seem to be cheerleading rather than actually reporting. For instance, the sales of all electric drive automobiles in the United States remains just a smidgen over 3%, slightly above the 2.5 to 3% of the total light vehicle sale market that they’ve had for the last five years. The sales of electrified vehicles have fluctuated significantly during rocky economic times — the premium charged for their electrification making them a tough sell when money is tight — with only Toyota being able to boast consistent, and consistently increasing, sales (though Ford’s C-Max and Fusion hybrids have impressive numbers for the first quarter of this year). Indeed, the reason that protagonists can claim such a huge surge in 2012 sales is because sales tanked in 2011. And take the Prius lineup out of the market data and hybrid sales look pretty slim (The Prius alone — not even all Toyota hybrids combined — accounts for over half of all hybrids ever sold in North America).

The other problem with just reading the headlines is that, depending on the news source and their motivation for revealing their statistics, the definition of what constitutes an electric vehicle morphs from the ridiculous to the sublime. For instance, in many cases, it could include everything from a purely battery-powered EV (Nissan Leaf) to light alternator assist vehicles (anything from General Motors with an eAssist moniker, the better to show the growth that everyone has been waiting for. Ditto for those who label anything that plugs into a wall socket as an electric car: Toyota’s Prius Plug-in is an impressive piece of kit with exemplary real-world fuel economy but it is most definitely not an electric car. Purists, always the contrarians, take the opposite tact, defining an electric vehicle as anything powered by batteries alone (by this definition, then, the Chevrolet Volt is not an electric vehicle though we, at Post Driving, do consider it an EV).

By that stringent definition, electric cars make up less than one-tenth of 1% of North America’s new car market. More importantly, there has been no mercurial rise in the pure electric vehicle segment. Indeed, other than Teslas, EVs have been a tough sell.

Even Tesla’s success story, however, is hardly reason to trumpet a revolution. The company recently announced that its S model outsold all other EVs, including GM’s recently resurgent Volt, fans ratcheting up their refrain that Elon Musk’s brainchild is the future. Unfortunately for Tesla lovers, proclaiming that the future of the EV market is about to boom on the face of the luxury-segment S outselling its low-cost competitors is a little like proclaiming that the sports car market ascendant if Ferrari managed to sell more 458s than Mazda does Miatas; chances are what the statistics would show would be that the MX-5 market had mysteriously tanked rather than that the Prancing Horse magically garnering significant market share. Tesla is to be congratulated for many things — the excellent performance of its S model, robust sales for what is, after all, an expensive, limited-use vehicle, etc. — but it remains a plaything for people with money to burn and is in no way indicative of an impending electric car revolution.

None of this is a surprise. What is a surprise — at least to me — is the news that loyalty to alternative powertrains is not a one-way street. Indeed, according to Tom Libby, a senior forecasting analyst for the company (which claims to have information on every car registered in the United States for the last 100 years, by the way), “Hybrid owners are not as loyal as one might think, a fair number have defected back to traditional powertrains.” Libby told DrivingtheNation.com that the “significant premium” demanded for hybrid vehicles and the tremendous strides in fuel economy by lower-cost conventional cars are reasons for the desertion back to the conventional. That revelation may prove problematic for protagonists of electric cars since projections for consistent growth in the electrified vehicle segment assumed that that once converts adopted a green ideology, they never returned to conventional automobiles.

The automotive industry, if it is indeed going to wean itself off fossil fuels, needs electric vehicles and hybrids to dramatically increase in popularity. But the genre desperately needs to gain credibility beyond early adopters. Misleading claims and overly optimistic prognostications are hardly the way to build public trust. Indeed, I suspect that it is precisely the electric vehicle protagonists’ phantasmagorical hype that has rendered the consuming public so skeptical.